Thoughts about journalism, technology and education

How the Arizona Republic Installed its 2nd Gen Pagination System

One of the most read newspaper industry technologist is David Cole, who published “The Cole Papers.” In 1997 he sent one of his reporters, John Bryan, to write about how Phoenix Newspapers replaced its first generation of pagination with a new system from CCI Europe. One of the reasons we selected CCI in 1995 was its ability to hold items in a publishing database. Here’s one of my quotes from the article.

Chief among the Republic strategist is Howard Finberg, longtime industry pundit, designer and evangelist who professes to be interested in pagination only as a means to an end.

“We don’t want to paginate anymore,” the paper’s director of information technology said. “I believe in publication systems that slice information into smaller and smaller pieces,” which can be used by an infinite number of information “products,” such as a web site, CD-ROM or whatever comes down the pike.

The article described how we made the transition [not quite complete when the reporter visited] and our vision for the future of newspaper publishing.